Syncro: Universal Billing
Company
Role
Year
Overview
Universal Billing is a Syncro feature that automatically pulls daily license counts from third-party vendors and maps them to customer records, so billing admins never have to manually count and enter licenses again. I designed the end-to-end experience, including the Customer Mapping Tool, the Vendor Usage Report, and the recurring invoice integration, shipping first with Proofpoint and building the foundation for all future vendor support across the Syncro marketplace.
Problem
Billing admins at MSPs were manually cross-referencing third-party vendor dashboards every month, counting licenses by hand, and entering them into Syncro to generate accurate invoices. For shops with dozens of customers across multiple vendors like Acronis, Proofpoint, and Microsoft 365, this process was time-consuming, error-prone, and completely disconnected from the actual usage data Syncro already had access to. There was no automated bridge between what vendors were reporting and what customers were being billed.
Solution
I designed a three-part system to close that gap. The Customer Mapping Tool lets admins link their vendor customers to Syncro organizations in a single table view, with clear status indicators showing what is mapped, unmapped, or detached. Once mapped, Syncro stores daily license usage counts per customer automatically, with the option to trigger a manual sync. A new Vendor Usage Report gives admins a clear, filterable view of license counts across all customers before billing runs. Finally, I introduced a new recurring invoice line item type called third-party vendor, which pulls live usage counts directly into the invoice and supports flexible billing logic including the ability to define included quantities so customers are only billed for licenses above a contracted threshold.
Impact
Universal Billing launched with Proofpoint support and was made available to all Syncro accounts on day one, with support for additional vendors rolling out throughout the year. The feature eliminated the monthly manual billing workflow entirely for supported vendors and reduced billing errors tied to license miscounts. It also introduced a new value layer for MSPs: the ability to offer included license bundles to their customers and only charge for true overages, making it easier to structure competitive managed services contracts.
“My company is thrilled with Syncro’s new Universal Billing feature. During the initial setup, we discovered a few Proofpoint licenses we hadn’t been billing for, an immediate win. Now we no longer have to spend time manually reconciling license counts each month. It’s a huge time saver for us and has turned into a great way to capture missed revenue. Can’t wait to see more integrations released for Universal Billing.”
– Tom Bull, President and CEO of Two River Computer